A New Oprichnina

The swearing in of Vladimir Putin for his third presidential term in May 2012 became a watershed separating the externally milder rule of Dmitri Medvedev from the harsh reaction to the changes, which have been ripening in Russia for the last dozen years. The main factors behind these changes were the many-years-long economic boom, generational shift and technological revolution, while the four years of Medvedev’s “détente” and his modernization rhetoric provided an additional incentive. The social structure of Russia has become more complex, groups have appeared expressing demand for a different model of government than the one personified by Putin—for a more competitive system, with mechanisms protecting investments and civil rights in a broad sense of the term, and lubricating the mechanisms of social mobility. Even some part of the elites, which had grown on Putin’s system, expected its further evolution—especially strengthening the security of capital, which would not be possible without an independent judiciary.

These expectations run counter to the interests of the “powers that be,”composed of Putin and his trusted comrades. This group is a beneficiary of the current system—lacking any real competition, lacking transparent decision-making and property- transferring processes, with a politicized system of justice. The President’s response to the ongoing changes—especially social ones—is an attempt to stop and reverse them. He wants to bring back the status quo ante—a system, which functioned perfectly during his first two terms, when the Kremlin was the principal decision-making centre, society’s role in important processes was limited to passive consent and the ideological sphere was shaped by the “allied” Orthodox Church. Those who no longer fit into such an authoritarian matrix are hounded today.

Fighting the Troublemakers

The first and most obvious target in Kremlin’s campaign against“troublemakers” is the political and social opponents involved in street protests or anti-Kremlin internet campaigns and building the foundations of a political alternative. The case of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny got the most publicity. He was sentenced to five years in prison after an investigation, which most observers regarded as fabricated. Less known outside Russia but much wider in its scope is the Bolotnaya Square case—an investigation into riots during an opposition demonstration on 6 May 2012, which, as an independent inquiry has shown, was provoked by police forces. The official investigation involves two hundred functionaries of the Investigative Committee, the most active security agency in today’s Russia, sometimes compared to Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina. About twenty people have been jailed for more than a year, questionings and house searches are going on. The first sentence has been a harsh one—four and a half years of penal colony for a young Moscow businessman Maxim Luzhyanin. As far as we know, Luzhyanin not so much “deserved” his punishment (he is supposed to have shoved a police officer) as he is a perfect albeit random personification of the wide social base of today’s “discontented”—young, well off and critical of the government. The randomness of the punishment is the key to the approach of the regime towards the opposition—the protesters are so numerous today that by way of a general warning rank-and-file or even accidental participants of anti-Kremlin manifestations are punished.

The campaign also affected the third sector, perceived by the Kremlin as the fifth column, financed and commandeered by Western security agencies. The regime attacks both the financial capacity of non-governmental organizations and their reputation, labeling them as “foreign agents.” According to a new law the status of a “foreign agent” must be sought by every organization receiving foreign grants (which is widespread) and acting in the field of politics—and the definition of “politics”introduced by this law is so capacious that the majority of NGOs concerned with protection of civil rights may be brought under this category. Very tellingly no organization inscribed itself in the register of foreign agents, despite possible severe sanctions for not doing so. But the restrictions have brought the desired result: financing of NGOs has been much reduced (also the frightened Russian donators have backed off ), many have been forced to close down their offices in Moscow, a few were suspended by the authorities and some moved abroad. At least for the short term the potential of non-governmental organizations has been strongly undermined.

Awaiting its turn is the voluntary sector, dynamically growing in recent years. During natural disasters (forest fires close to Moscow, the flooding in Kuban) young volunteers quickly convoked through the internet, organized the necessary help and financial resources, proved to be faster and more efficient than the relevant government institutions. The regime treated this activity, not licensed from above, as a threat. The response is a bill, which regulates this by definition of spontaneous activity: volunteers will have to register, obtain special permits and sign a contract with a mandated organization to be able to act.

The harassment also affected the communities of experts and academics. A scandal broke out around the “frivolity” of experts who prepared a report on the Khodorkovsky’s second trial, critical of the regime. The experts, among them a former judge of the Constitutional Court, Tamara Morshchakova, and president of one of the largest universities in Russia (the New Economic School) Sergey Guriev, were accused of acting on a political commission paid from “stolen Yukos money” and were questioned by public prosecutors, who also took an interest in their private correspondence and phone conversations. For fear of being arrested Guriev left Moscow and is staying in Paris, and the whole affair has been labeled as the “experts’ plot”—an allusion to the infamous Stalinist “doctors’ plot.”

Artists… Stand at Attention!

The wide-ranging “campaign against disloyalty” has also reached the artistic community. The first act of political-artistic censorship was the 2012 case of the Pussy Riot, anarchist- feminist band originating from the community surrounding the art group Voina (“The War”), which for years have been shocking Russians with rather indecent satire directed at the regime. The Pussy Riot staged a happening called “Mother of God, chase Putin away” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which is the “official Kremlin church” and a symbol of the close alliance between the Orthodox Church and the Kremlin. For this prank the court gifted the two girls with “dvushechka” (two years of penal colony), a slang expression President Putin used, despite (or perhaps because of ) intense international protests. The severity of the punishment undoubtedly also reflected the place where the happening occurred: desecration of the “chief temple in the country” was spectacularly punished.

Another piece of the campaign was the case of Marat Gelman, one of the best known Russian art dealers and previously a public relations man close to the Kremlin. Gelman is perceived as a “man of the system” but his attempts at maintaining at least some measure of artistic autonomy finally met with disapproval. For a few years Gelman had been running the museum of art PERMM in Perm, a region associated with labor camps, where in the Soviet period many famous dissidents (among them Vladimir Bukovsky and Sergei Kovalev) and in the 19th century Polish insurgents served their terms. Every summer, Perm stages“Pilorama,” the only festival in Russia combining poetic song with human rights issues. Under Gelman’s direction PERMM fitted very well into this atmosphere and became one of the most innovative art galleries in Russia. One step too far for the regime was Vasily Slonov’s exhibition “Welcome! Sochi-2014,” lampooning the organization of the approaching Winter Olympics. Mocking the preparations to Sochi (especially the scale of corruption) has long been the staple of Russian internet. But promoting this mocking to the rank of art infuriated the powers-that-be and Gelman was dismissed with a bang.

“Otherness” Targeted

Kremlin’s campaign against “breaching the norms” is waged not only in the political and social domain but has also reached the ideological, cultural and even moral sphere. Wielding the term “traditional values,” this policy stigmatizes the opponents as a minority for which there is no place among the “traditionalist majority.” Fanning up social resentments and intolerance towards various kinds of “otherness” is Kremlin’s way of consolidating this part of society, which is regarded as Putin’s constituency.

The campaign against values-destroying sabotage was begun by a law which penalizes “offence against religious feelings.” The law in fact strengthens the status of the Orthodox Church, for it is meant to discourage “slandering” of Church leaders and may silence the mostly agnostic opposition community, openly critical of the Kremlin-Church alliance. One of the “lobbyists” behind the law is supposed to have been Patriarch Kirill himself, much perturbed by last-year reports of web users about his wealth—an expensive watch (not quite successfully “photoshopped out” of an official photograph) and a luxurious suite in the centre of Moscow, where a female “distant cousin” of the Patriarch was registered as a tenant.

The next group to be targeted were sexual minorities. Since 1st July Russian law forbids “promoting non-traditional sexual behavior among children.” Even the proponents of these regulations have trouble with specifying a list of such behaviors. So far the law has resulted in deporting a group of Norwegian LGBTI activists from Russia, who in July tried to organize a seminar on tolerance towards sexual minorities in Murmansk. But far more consequential is not the law itself but the accompanying—and tacitly supported by the regime—campaign in the media and the internet, aimed at“deviants.”The main face of this campaign is the St. Petersburg city councilor Vitaly Milonov, styling himself as an “ultra-orthodox Orthodox” and hunting down various manifestations of “sacrilege.”But the most extreme position was taken by the deputy to the Trans- Baikal provincial assembly, Alexander Mikhailov, who stated that “homosexuals should have their backs whipped by Cossacks on public squares in city centers.” Russia experienced a series of attacks against actual or alleged gays, including the killing of a young inhabitant of Volgograd, who decided on a coming out and was savagely murdered by his friends. And the infamous neo-Nazi Maxim Martsinkevich a.k.a “Hatchet,” initiated the creation of a whole network of lightning brigades practicing a routine called “safari”—hunting down supposed juvenile gays and then bullying them in order to “drive homosexuality out of their minds.” Recordings of these “sessions” make their rounds on the internet, leading to personal tragedies of these young people.

The culturally“different,” that is labor migrants from the former Soviet Union, also take the brunt. In recent years they have become an indispensable element of the labor market in all major Russian cities—they perform the worst paid jobs, they are often exploited by their employers and lack elementary health and legal care as well as acceptable living conditions. But although their presence is necessary for efficient functioning of cites and is based on corrupt networks in the immigration agency and municipal services, migrants are regularly subjected to hate campaigns by the government. They are denounced by state television using the term “ethnic crime,” they are hounded in Moscow by Cossack patrols, they are attacked by politicians trying to capitalize on social resentment. Every now and then the authorities stage spectacular round-ups in migrant communities, and the state TV threatens its audience with a flood of non-Russian-speaking and culturally alien migrants and thus increases the already high level of hostility towards “strangers.” While diverging attention from acute social problems, unresolved for years.

Placing the Bets on “Common People”

Confronted with the “loss” of active social groups, the Kremlin places its bets on this part of the Russian society, which does not question its course—the Russia of small towns and villages, inert, uninterested in public matters, expecting from the authorities only higher benefits. Placing the bets on “common people” is becoming an element of a new ideological triad, a grotesque interpretation of the Tsarist triad “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality.” Today, autocracy is expressed by the top-down, centralized, personalized power vested in Putin. Orthodoxy is symbolized by Kremlin’s alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, which is to promote “traditional” values contrasting with “Western moral depravity.” And finally, nationality is illustrated by promoting “sound social forces” by the Kremlin: workers and budget sector employees from the countryside juxtaposed to the “decadent” Moscow middle class.

On this “national” wave, the Kremlin is building a new structure, which is to replace the discredited United Russia party as its political and social base—the Popular Front movement composed of the working class from the towns and villages. The Front is ostentatiously distancing itself from United Russia associated with the corrupt Moscow elite. It is to impress with its scale: it includes several-million-strong workforces of huge state-owned companies, arbitrarily registered by their management loyal to Putin—Russian Railways, Russian Post, the numerous arms factories, hospitals and schools. Last year it was announced that the nominal number of Front members was 40 million, which met with ironic comments saying that the Front would soon become more numerous than the Russian Federation itself.

Hitting at His Own Base

While fighting opponents in this or other form has always accompanied Putin’s rule, the wave of repressions against his own political base is something really new. The media almost daily report on abuses of power by Moscow ministers and regional officials, on investigations, arrests, house searches and questionings, and news in the main television channels resemble a criminal chronicle.

One of the aims of such a policy is disguising the ineffectiveness of the government and shifting responsibility for still unresolved problems— rampant and growing corruption, very bad state of infrastructure, failures of flag projects worth billions of rubles—on subordinates. But it seems that an even more important reason for this “shake-up of the ranks” is the growing distrust of Putin in the loyalty of his own base. Putin’s announcement in September 2011 that he would reassume the president’s office met with murmurings of the administration, economic elites, expert and media communities. After a “more relaxed” presidency of Medvedev a major part of the elite expected further liberalization. Putin’s return and taking a harder course against the opposition, the third sector and officials exacerbated the dissatisfaction, openly expressed not only by experts but also by some ministers, especially from Medvedev’s circle. Justice minister Alexander Konovalov dared to criticize the law on “foreign agents” and suggested that his ministry will not be too eager in its implementation. Part of the Russian elite also criticized the organization of the parliamentary election (including the actions of the Electoral Commission) and the Kremlin-sponsored bill banning adoption of Russian orphans by American citizens—Kremlin needed some effort to push this bill through. Part of Kremlin’s old guard (for example Vladislav Surkov and Gleb Pavlovsky) said openly that the methods used by presidential administration went too far and that the return of Putin instead of Medvedev’s re-election was a political mistake.

Putin’s response to this dissatisfaction was a reshuffle, which disturbed the traditional balance of power between various clans within the elite. Persons unreservedly executing Putin’s orders or even guessing what he would like to be done came to the foreground. The intellectual Surkov was replaced in the role of Kremlin’s main political strategist by the bureaucrat Vyacheslav Volodin, advocate of using harsh methods against opponents and the founding father of the Popular Front. The President’s administration was backed up with Putin’s former intelligence comrades, including its head Sergey Ivanov and Yevgeny Shkolov, director of the “super-secret service” for monitoring financial operations, tracing financial transactions of the elite. The Investigative Committee, run by Putin’s university mate Alexander Bastrykin, became President’s policing arm. The Committee launched an avalanche of accusations against officials and politicians regarded as “insufficiently loyal” to President’s new policy. The highest-placed victim of this policy was the former defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov, accused of numerous instances of financial fraud in his ministry. On the regional level, the harshest punishment was meted out to the governor of the Tula province, sentenced to nine and a half years in prison for taking bribes.

The president’s administration forced through—despite the Duma’s resistance—a bill forbidding state administration officials to have bank accounts abroad and introducing strict control of their possessions, income and expenses. The list of possessions created by the President’s administration is called “the largest data-base of kompromat [discrediting materials]” in Russia, meant to help rein in officials, especially those not always staunchly following the line. The process of passing the bill was accompanied— perhaps not accidentally—by various scandals connected with revelations about foreign real estate owned by several deputies and senators, who subsequently had to resign. This policy has already been dubbed the “nationalization of the elites”—that is isolating Russian officials from the West, where they deposit their money and where their families live, which makes them reluctant to support these moves of the Kremlin which they regard as too authoritarian and anti-Western.

Turbulence Ahead

The repressive policy seemingly retrieves Kremlin’s dominance, silencing the murmurings and weakening many dissatisfied groups. However, President Putin governs in completely different conditions today than just a few years ago, when his rule had solid foundations in a widespread social support, economic boom and support of the elites, for whom the president was a distributor of goods and a warrant of immunity. Today the continued rule and “old recipes” of Putin generate a growing fatigue, while speculations about plastic surgeries, which are to help Putin in stopping time in its course, raise increasingly sardonic comments. Putin still holds on to power but the cost of maintaining it has considerably grown.

Russia is more and more resembling the image from Day of the Oprichnik, a novel by Vladimir Sorokin published seven years ago and today called prophetic by many. It presents a vision of Russia isolating itself from the world and separated by a Great Wall, making a living on pumping natural gas and governed by a tsar and by his oprichnina. Omnipotent oprichniks wield gadgets straight out of a sci-fi movie and burn down properties of disloyal boyars. Also today, the fundamental principle of the “ruler” is apparently striking fear within his own ranks, forced to evince unconditional loyalty by the dictum “he who is not with us, is against us.” Art dealer Marat Gelman, spitted out by the system, says: “It is an oprichnina situation when also your own people should fear. You may declare loyalty for the president but you cannot feel completely safe. Everybody is afraid now, and those inside the elite are even more afraid than those outside.”

Historical analogies employed to describe Putin’s era invoke both the times of Ivan the Terrible and the Soviet era of stagnation under Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. Both these epochs, aimed at “long existence,” eventually came to an end. Today the question “what’s after Putin” keeps recurring, albeit unofficially. As well as “who’s after Putin.” If we stay with historical analogies, we could speculate if Putin’s successor will be someone like Boris Godunov, by the way a former oprichnik, or rather like Mikhail Gorbachev, author of the peaceful dismounting of the system. Intensifying repressions against the people around Putin may heighten the risk of a violent reaction of the elites, who increasingly perceive their leader as a risk factor. Literature again suggests dramatic (and hopefully exaggerated) scenarios. The short story opening the most recent book by Sorokin, called “Monoclone,” presents a tragic end of a NKVD officer, “cheerfully” retired but caught up by a rather gloomy revenge for the sins of the past after many years.